From the Year of the Horse to the Year of the Snake: A Shelter Island story

Call me Lolo.

That’s the name I ended up with in Shanghai, China, in 2002. And my husband Bob became — you guessed it — Bobo.

Shanghai is where we met Metropolitan opera singer Hao Jiang Tian. You can call him Tian. He’s the featured guest at the Friends of Music season opener, with six iSing Festival artists, on Feb. 16 in the Year of the Snake. It’s a Chinese New Year concert. But it is a Shelter Island story from the very beginning. 

Back in that Year of the Horse, 2002, the second year of the Perlman Music Program on Shelter Island, Bob and I were writing a series of feature stories about PMP for The New York Times. We’d been more or less embedded on the campus that summer, at the end of which they decamped for Shanghai with some of their extraordinary young string and piano players (PMP had a piano program back then) to work with students at the Shanghai Conservatory.

We tagged along, even though the series had been suddenly canceled midway through. We paid our own way because we were so enamored of the program and the people; we thought we’d write about Perlman in Shanghai for another publication.  

We did end up writing a story for The Times — about Tian: “Hated Music, but Hear Him Now; From Cultural Revolution Chaos to Metropolitan Fame,” by Robert Lipsyte and Lois B. Morris, October 22, 2002. And Tian and I began to work on his memoir, published in 2008: “Along the Roaring River: My Wild Ride from Mao to the Met.”

Tian and his wife, Martha Liao, both naturalized American citizens, had come to  Shanghai for his recital at the Shanghai Grand Theatre. Martha was also lending an organizing hand to the Perlmans, and in the lobby of the hotel where we were all staying, she introduced us to her husband.

Tian is a storyteller. He began to share tales about growing up during the Cultural Revolution; about living alone in Beijing as a teenager after his parents were sent away (truth is, he sneaked back), about working in a factory. Fast forward to 1983, when despite being reported to the Culture Ministry for illegally performing an American folksong (“Jambalaya”) and shaking his hips like Elvis,  he managed to finagle his way out of China to the University of Denver. Now to 1993 when he’s on stage of the Metropolitan Opera taking a bow alongside Luciano Pavarotti. 

Tian has a word for it: yuan. It means fate, the way things are meant to be. And today, 23 years after Bob and I encountered him and Martha in 2002, it is clear how much Shelter Island has shaped our own yuan. I bought my house on Shelter island in 1984. I met Bob on Shelter Island in 1998. PMP came to Shelter Island in 2001. The next year, because of the Perlmans, Bob and I went to China, where we met Tian and Martha. At Tian’s recital — the first time we heard him sing (what a bass voice!) — Itzhak and Toby Perlman were right there in the audience.

It never was clear why our PMP series had been canceled by The Times. Howell Raines was the executive editor at the time, and he and Bob never really got on.

Raines’s managing editor, Gerald Boyd, was overheard saying, “Why don’t they write about rock and roll camp?” Maybe it had to do with a power struggle with the culture editor at the time, who was ultimately transferred out of that job (but not before he ran the Tian piece). Bob lost his sports column that fall, when Raines refused to renew his 13th contract. Bob figured that would happen.               

Raines and Boyd were themselves fired about eight months later, after reporter Jason Blair, a Raines and Boyd favorite, was revealed to have fabricated and plagiarized many of his stories. Joe Llelyveld returned as interim executive editor and immediately asked Bob to come back. But Bob said no. It was that yuan thing. 

Bob and I had had such wonderful time writing the PMP stories, and with Tian entering our lives we wanted to keep going. We discovered that we loved writing about opera — specifically people involved in opera. Before 2002, Bob’s journalism was mostly sports, and mine was psychology and mental health. Combine action with strange behavior and you get opera. The Times published all our co-bylined stories.

Bob and I married in 2004 (a Monkey year). Tian sang at our wedding, with Martha at the piano. We held our reception at a Chinese restaurant in the city that had Chinese karaoke. Tian took the microphone and invited everyone to sing along. 

We would still like to write about PMP in Shanghai. One of my favorite stories: Merry Peckham was coaching a string quartet at the conservatory. Bob and I were observing. The Chinese cello student never turned up. So Merry sang the cello part.

Coda: The Year of the Tiger, June 4, 2022, a Friends of Music performance day, but the artists canceled that very morning because of COVID. The PMP chamber music program was underway. In a panic I reached out. By evening Ms. Peckham, now the chamber program director, sat in the audience as her merry band of players brought joy to the audience. Yuan, as it was meant to be.